IF you are serving in the United States military and have the misfortune of being killed on active duty, your family will receive $100,000.
If you are an illegal immigrant who crossed the border during the Trump presidency and were separated from your family, you may soon be receiving $450,000 in compensation. Families may get up to $1,000,000.
This is according to plans being discussed by the Biden administration in a move which could cost upwards of $1billion.
While willing to give illegal immigrants lumps of cash that many legitimate American citizens could only dream of having in their bank accounts (the median American household has just over $10,000 in savings), the US government was recently mulling over moves to make banks report all transactions over $600 to the taxman. A more glaring disparity in how the government views these different groups is hardly imaginable.
The proposal to make the Guatemalans and Nicaraguans who illegally crossed the border among the wealthiest people in the republic must rank as among one of the most patently insane proposals put forward by a government in power.
Its insanity is multi-faceted. One can only assume that it is designed to be as inflammatory as humanly possible, pushing the United States closer to the verge of civil war.
All the signs of burgeoning conflict are there. Amid the proliferation of draconian policies from the White House, not limited to the forced vaccination of huge swathes of the American public, comes an economic crisis hurtling down the line. Supply chains have been FUBARed and inflation begins to rear its head once more.
Tens of thousands of military personnel stand to be discharged if they fail to submit to government demands to be vaccinated. Whether so thoroughly alienating such large numbers of those who have been trained to kill apparently has not figured in the White House’s calculations.
Scepticism about the long-term viability of the Union grows daily. Disagreements flourish, and not just about the small stuff. The post-war consensus that defined American politics until the early part of this century has given way to increased factionalism as the Left uses society’s fracture lines to destabilise the body politic.
Whether the teaching of Critical Race Theory should become centrally mandated for all of America’s youth is a question that cannot be settled. Disagreeing with the prospect of your child being indoctrinated with the poisonous mantra may lead to your being investigated by the FBI.
The ideological bridge between those who want to just get on with their lives and those who see the world as theirs to mould in their ideological image is too great.
Three hundred million souls cannot coexist in a nation with such fundamental differences. Whereas in the past a policy disagreement might involve the marginal rate of taxation, it is instead today the very legitimacy of the state itself, together with the culture and history that undergirds it. Such are the fruits of the Left putting difference, not commonality, as the steeled cap on their political battering ram.
The cost of diversity is increased authoritarianism. Differences can be resolved only by the firm hand of the government.
It is a little-appreciated fact that freedom coexists unobserved amid similarity. This basic fact renders impotent much of the wishful libertarianism often seen on the Right: Only when you agree on the fundamentals can you place such an emphasis on liberty. The 95 per cent which is agreed upon will dull the effect of the five per cent of disagreement.
When a couple fall out and their differences become irreconcilable, divorce is usually the way out. Secession of red states is a logical solution, but it is unlikely that the ascendant Left could countenance such a thing.
Viewing their opponents not merely as wrong but evil, any new Red America would, in their fevered minds, become a bastion of the usual tired verbiage: Intolerance, racism, et cetera. Forever viewing themselves as crusaders, they fail to recognise they are endlessly tilting at windmills.
The only other way out of the dilemma is war, although it is surely the least optimal solution. Yet if it came to that, I think I know which side I would put my money on.
It wouldn’t be the gender studies professors and diversity managers, but instead the much-derided ‘deplorables’, among whom are many who served in the military and who now know that their death is not worth even a quarter in terms of compensation as those who are inconvenienced while crossing the border illegally.
It would be better to head things off early. The myopic nature of all modern Western governments precludes that, however. An attempt to stave off the disaster may only happen when it’s all too late: Like many of these things, it will come gradually, then all of a sudden.
